On the Illegitimate Roles of Values in Expert Reasoning and Interventions


The idea that there is no legitimate roles to values in expert reasoning and interventions is widely rejected, and rightly so. There is also a tacit agreement that some roles of values are nevertheless illegitimate. The difficulty lies in characterizing with some precision what these illegitimate roles are. This article starts by arguing that the division of epistemic labor underlying the phenomenon of expertise necessarily involves lossy information compression. It then builds a small model to evaluate some propositions in the literature on how to delineate the set of illegitimate roles of values in expert reasoning and interventions. These propositions include the restriction to epistemic values, the distinction between direct and indirect roles (Douglas 2009) and a priority given to epistemic values (Steel 2010). I argue that these propositions are faulty. I finally propose and assess an alternative proposition that relies on the distinction between lossy and lossless information processing.

Slides are here.

 

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 16 octobre 2016 à 10 h 08 min.